Turn on variations settings so you can create variations of your site

As a site collection administrator, you start the process of creating a variation site by designating the top-level site for your variations hierarchy and setting up how the variations feature will work and how much control the people using it will have over updating it or managing the content on the target sites.

You specify these settings on the Variations Settings page.

Note: Only site collection administrators can configure the variations feature so that sub-site owners and users can use it.

Open the Variations Settings page

Note: You must be able to see the Site Collection Administration options on the Site Settings page to complete the procedures in this topic – that is, you must be a site collection owner.

At the top-level site of your site collection, click Site Actions, and then click Site Settings.

On the Site Settings page, under Site Collection Administration, click Variations.

The Variations Settings page opens.

Specify the URL for the top-level site in your variations hierarchy

On the Variations Settings page, in the Variation Home section, type a / to specify the top-level site of your site collection. Or, if you are simply creating variations for a sub- site, click Browse and then navigate to the sub-site you want to use as the root of the variations hierarchy.

Choose whether to create copies of all sites and pages from the source on the variation sites

On the Variations Settings page, in the Automatic Creation section, do one of the following:

If you want to automatically create a copy of all new sites and pages, click Automatically create site and page variations.

If you want the owner of a site or page to determine when a site or page is created and on which target variation site, click Do not automatically create site and page variations. (If you choose this option, then in the future you must specify which target label to create a new target page on once for each target label. That is, if you have five target labels and you only want to create the page on four of them, you must use Create Variations four times.

Choose whether to recreate pages that have been deleted on target sites

In the Variations Settings page, in the Recreate Deleted Target Page section, choose one of the following options:

If you don't want a new target page to be created when the source page is republished, click Do not recreate a new target page when the source page is republished.

To re-create a new target page when the source page is republished if the previous target page has been deleted, click Recreate a new target page when the source page is republished.

Choose whether to send notifications of new or updated sites or pages

In the Variations Settings page, in the Notification section, specify whether to send e-mail notification that new sub-site or page of a target site is created, or when a target page is updated with revisions from the source variation.

If a sub-site is created, an e-mail message is sent to the owner of the parent sub-site in which the new sub-site is created. If a target page is updated as a result of a change made to its source variation, a message is sent to the owner of the site in which the page list exists.

Choose which resources to use for target page variations

In the Variations Settings page, in the Resources section, do one of the following:

To use existing resources, click Reference existing resources.

To copy the resources, click Copy resources.

Click OK to close the Variations Settings page.

The next step is to create the variation hierarchy and add target sites by adding new variation labels. To do that, you go back to Site Collection Administration settings. See Create a variations site.